Forty years is too long to hold onto heartbreak. Members of the 1983 Houston men’s basketball team, which found itself on the wrong side of one of the most famous upsets in N.C.A.A. tournament history, have processed that moment, made peace with it and moved on with their lives.
But in recent days those former Houston players, many of them in their 60s, have sensed echoes and early pangs of some familiar feelings — aspiration, hope, excitement — as they watch this year’s Cougars advance through the N.C.A.A. tournament.
Houston this month earned a No. 1 seed in the tournament for the first time since 1983, when it lost the final in stunning fashion to North Carolina State. On Friday, the Cougars will face Miami in the round of 16 in Kansas City, Mo. — the same city where the 1983 squad played its own games at this point in the tournament.
Consider, too, that this year’s Final Four is in Houston, and it becomes no surprise that Cougars alumni and fans are dreaming of what might happen if everything falls into place over the next week.
“This is the best chance since ’82 or ’83 or ’84 to grab that golden championship ring,” said Clyde Drexler, 60, who played for those early ’80s Houston teams before starring in the N.B.A. “The table is set. It’d be a great story.”
Bestowed with the nickname Phi Slama Jama (“Texas’ tallest fraternity”), the 1983 Cougars provided basketball fans with an irresistible look at the shape of what was to come in the sport. Drexler and his teammates — like Hakeem Olajuwon, Michael Young, Larry Micheaux and Benny Anders — elevated the dunk, which had been banned in college basketball from 1967 to 1976, into both an art form and modus operandi under Coach Guy Lewis’s high-octane system. Their swaggering run of success put Houston on the map, however briefly, as a bona fide basketball town.
But despite reaching three straight Final Fours (from 1982 to 1984) and back-to-back championship games (1983 and 1984), the team never won a national title. The 1983 final, in which Houston was heavily favored, was decided on an unlikely, last-second dunk by N.C. State, and the Cougars became one of the best teams to fall short of winning a championship.
Almost exactly 40 years later, Houston has returned to prominence with a more hard-nosed style under the guidance of Coach Kelvin Sampson. That the Cougars have advanced to the round of 16 while battling injuries and playing below their best has been held up by some as a testament to the core tenets of their approach: defense and rebounding.
The old-timers would love to see these young Cougars accomplish what they could not. Yet Reid Gettys, who played point guard for the Cougars from 1981-85, brushed aside the notion that any of the current players should even think about the program’s past disappointments or feel the weight of its bittersweet history. He doubted the young players even knew about Phi Slama Jama, anyway, and guessed that many of their parents were not old enough to have much memory of that era, either.
“Does it have any redeeming factor for the fact that we fell short? I don’t really think so,” Gettys, the school’s career assist leader, said of a potential championship run this season. “Now, will the old guys celebrate as hard as a bunch of 60-year-olds can celebrate if we win? Absolutely. One hundred percent.”
Houston has never been a consistent basketball powerhouse, but in the early 1980s, it was one of the hottest tickets in the game. Lewis assembled a team mostly composed of local talent and, in an era when most teams preferred to slow down their offense, encouraged his players to fly above the rim, to run and dunk with abandon. In his reasoning, the slam dunk was a high-percentage play that fired up the team and its fans and, hopefully, intimidated the opponents.
The team’s amusing nickname was birthed after one particularly slam-heavy Sunday afternoon win, when Thomas Bonk, a sportswriter composing a column for the Tuesday edition of the Houston Post, began playing around with a screwball concept: What would a dunking fraternity be called?
Bonk sat in a mostly empty arena pondering the question until it came to him: Phi Slama Jama. The moniker was immediately embraced by the team and its fans, appearing in short order on T-shirts, coffee mugs and posters, and helping to raise the profile of the team inside the city and out.
“That team represented a seismic shift in college basketball,” Bonk said, referring to the soaring style that would become far more prominent in basketball in the late 1980s and beyond. “These guys were the first high-flying basketball circus.”
After falling again in the 1984 championship game, the team never came close to reaching those same heights. Lewis retired in 1986 with 592 career wins with Houston, the only team he coached, and the team seemed to lose its way. From 1985 to 2017, including two seasons with Drexler as coach, the Cougars made the national tournament just four times and failed to win a single game in their appearances.
Gettys, who has called Cougars games on the radio for three decades while also working as a lawyer for Exxon Mobil, recalled counting the number of Houston fans in the arena during one of its poorer spells.
“We counted 56,” Gettys said, laughing. “That’s not hyperbole. That’s not exaggeration.”
The start of the team’s turnaround coincided neatly with the arrival of Sampson, who had established himself as one of college basketball’s top coaches in stints with Montana Tech, Washington State, Oklahoma and Indiana. He was hired by Houston in 2014 after serving a five-year show-cause penalty for violations involving impermissible calls and text messages to recruits.
The Cougars have risen steadily since then. In 2018, they won their first national tournament game since the Phi Slama Jama years. Sampson then guided Houston to the round of 16 in 2019, the Final Four in 2021 and the round of 8 in 2022. (The tournament was canceled in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.) Houston fans hope there is more to come.
“We always felt like there were programs that looked down on us,” said Jim Duffer, who was one of the student managers for the team in the Phi Slama Jama years. “Now it’s time to stick it in their ear and win this whole damn thing.”
There remains a long road ahead. Fans have been closely tracking the health of senior guard Marcus Sasser, the team’s best player, who has been slowed in recent weeks by a lingering groin injury. They delighted in the timely emergence of junior guard Tramon Mark, who helped carry the load on Sunday with a team-high 26 points as Houston came back from a halftime deficit against Auburn in the second round.
Gettys noted that nothing was assured for any team, even the most favored, in the round of 16, where the opponent tends to be either very good or very hot. But the tough road would make a deep run for Houston that much sweeter for those who remember their biggest heartbreak.
“If the perfect script comes together,” said Jim Nantz, the longtime sportscaster who graduated from Houston in 1981 and has remained close to the program, “if the stars are aligned, April the 3rd will be a magical night.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.